I’ve spent more than thirty years in the trenches of ordinary church life — long enough to know that most of the hardest work of the Christian life doesn’t happen on Sunday morning. It happens on Tuesday afternoon, in a tense kitchen, a quiet car ride, a difficult staff meeting, a text message that took an hour to write.

That conviction is what gave rise to Grace in Everyday Relationships. I write as a pastor who has sat with couples whose marriages were cooling in the same sanctuary where they worshiped, with parents and adult children separated by years of unspoken hurt, with faithful believers exhausted by conflicts that seemed to follow them everywhere. My aim is not theory. It is to put solid Reformed theology to work in the places where most Christians actually live their lives.

I was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1973 and raised as the son of an evangelical minister — shaped early by a home where the gospel and ordinary life were not kept in separate rooms. I studied music at Henderson State University, then Pastoral Ministry at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and Theology/Pulpit Communication at Trinity College and Theological Seminary. Since 1999, I’ve served as a senior pastor in Mississippi churches, in both fully supported and bivocational roles, and I currently shepherd a congregation in Tupelo, Mississippi. I also serve as Logistics Manager of Safety and Compliance for a Christian, family-owned building-products manufacturer — a workplace that has given me a long, weekly education in what grace looks like outside the church walls.

My wife, Denise, and I have been married since 1994. Together, we’ve raised two children who are now married; welcomed foster daughters into our family; and recently become grandparents. Family life — with its joys, losses, repairs, and surprises — has been the laboratory where the truths in my writing have been tested and refined.

My prayer for Grace in Everyday Relationships, and for everything I write through Going Pastoral, is that ordinary believers would come to see their everyday relationships not as obstacles to discipleship but as the very place where Christ is forming them — one small, faithful step at a time.